The disgraceful Coughlin affair

Last fall, I met Maj. Steve Coughlin at a Washington conference regarding the Muslim Brotherhood. He was at the time a Pentagon intelligence analyst who had done a lot of work on jihad ideology, and was convinced that the US government was failing to understand the role of religious doctrine in guiding Islamist behavior. I found him to be a soft-spoken but very impressive man.

Well, the Pentagon sacked him not long ago for advocating politically incorrect views on Islam. Here's a press account from the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, who is extremely well connected in military circles:

Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, has been fired from his position on the military's Joint Staff. The action followed a report in this space last week revealing opposition to his work for the military by pro-Muslim officials within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England.

Mr. Coughlin was notified this week that his contract with the Joint Staff will end in March, effectively halting the career of one of the U.S. government's most important figures in analyzing the nature of extremism and ultimately preparing to wage ideological war against it.

He had run afoul of a key aide to Mr. England, Hasham Islam, who confronted Mr. Coughlin during a meeting several weeks ago when Mr. Islam sought to have Mr. Coughlin soften his views on Islamist extremism.

Mr. Coughlin was accused directly by Mr. Islam of being a Christian zealot or extremist "with a pen," according to defense officials. Mr. Coughlin appears to have become one of the first casualties in the war of ideas with Islamism.

The officials said Mr. Coughlin was let go because he had become "too hot" or controversial within the Pentagon.

Misguided Pentagon officials, including Mr. Islam and Mr. England, have initiated an aggressive "outreach" program to U.S. Muslim groups that critics say is lending credibility to what has been identified as a budding support network for Islamist extremists, including front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

For all its bluster about fighting Islamic terrorism, the Bush administration has done a bang-up job of mainstreaming Muslim leaders and organizations in this country that proclaim themselves to be moderate, and which are taken at face value by gullible government officials. As Gertz earlier reported:

Mr. England has been a leading advocate of what critics in the Pentagon say is a misguided attempt to reach out to the wrong Muslims, regardless of their views, in an effort to counter Muslim extremism.

That approach has kept military and civilian officials from conducting much-needed assessments of how Muslim extremists are waging war because doing so would involving analysis of Muslim religious tenets, a politically taboo subject area.

At the Counterterrorism Blog, Jeffrey Breinholt offers an introduction into the case Coughlin was making, but which the Pentagon apparently doesn't want to hear. Given that we are facing religiously-based terrorism, we have to understand the role of Islamic doctrine as a guide to thought and behavior, he argues. Remember, he's arguing as a military intelligence officer, in terms relevant to his discipline. Excerpt:

[To Coughlin,] the War on Terror is being thrown off by what he describes as the “Current Approach:” the view that Islamic-based extremism is aberrant and that Islam has become a “religion hijacked.” To Coughlin, this view is pernicious in part because it is being pushed by those who claim that Westerners should rely solely on Muslims to tell us what Islam is, much like the late Professor Edward Said attacked the notion that Westerners could ever understand what people in the “Orient” thought and how they behaved. Coughlin argues that the Current Approach represents an outsourcing of the information requirements that the IPB [Intellectual Preparation of the Battlefield] process is not structured to answer, much like a defendant taking the prosecutor’s word that the statute is constitutional. In American litigation, the resulting strategy will be based on input from people not aligned with the interests of the defendant. Applying this problem to the military challenge and the IPB, “Inputs into the decisionmaking process from the Current Approach are the product of borrowed knowledge from individuals and entities that may be either unknown or unbeholden to American national security interests.”

The consequences of uncritically accepting the Current Approach is the unstated corollary that because extremists do not represent “true” Islam, Islamic law itself should be excluded from analytical processes that support threat development. This tendency is culturally enticing to us, for we come from a tradition where arguments over the merits of particular religions are considered unpolite (and unpolitic) dinner party conversation. This tradition undoubtedly reinforces our inability to look closely at Islamic religious doctrine, and to look elsewhere for help.

Breinholt explains that Coughlin does an intel analysis of the various Islamic law traditions, and finds that the compelling bulk of the evidence does not back up claims that "true" Islam does not teach this or that bad thing. Coughlin's main point is that our government is not asking the kinds of hard, critical questions it needs to ask about what doctrinal Islam requires of its adherents, and that by declining to do so, it's getting a distorted view of what the actual battlefield is like. Breinholt again:

So in the end, it does not matter whether Coughlin is right about Islamic doctrine, as much as that the questions are being asked by people who are practicing the appropriate professional standards (another one of Coughlin’s key points). The U.S. government needs to ask these questions, rather than blithely concluding that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by Al Qaeda. Even if Coughlin is wrong about the big issues of Islam, he is certainly correct that military planners should be asking about the religious basis for Al Qaeda’s actions, so we can better predict how the adherents of “radical Islam” can be expected to act. That is really what matters.

The military's p.c. on this question really surprises me. I mean, we see it happening in the news media, because of p.c. reasons and because the press by and large doesn't get religion. But you'd think the military wouldn't be so sentimental.